Elizabeth Hull and Deborah James Introduction: popular ...

Elizabeth Hull and Deborah James Introduction: popular economies in South Africa Article (Published version) (Refereed)

Original citation: Hull, Elizabeth and James, Deborah (2012) Introduction: popular economies in South Africa. Africa: the journal of the International African Institute, 82 (01), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.1017/S0001972011000696 © 2012 International African Institute This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42043/ Available in LSE Research Online: August 2013 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/Experts/profile.aspx?KeyValue=d.a.james%40lse.ac.uk

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AFR

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0001972011000696

http://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42043/

INTRODUCTION: POPULAR ECONOMIESIN SOUTH AFRICA

Elizabeth Hull and Deborah James

African economies have long been a matter of concern to anthropologists,not least in the pages of Africa. These economies are situated, somewhat contra-dictorily, between global settings of financialized capitalism on the one hand andimpoverished local arenas where cash-based economic transfers predominateon the other. The more such economies appear to be tied to wider global arenasand operations that place them beyond the reach of ordinary people, the morenecessary it is to explore the logics and decisions that tie them inexorably tospecific everyday settings.

The articles in this volume aim to undertake such an investigation by exploringpopular, local economies in the case of South Africa: a setting which many writershave justly regarded as ‘exceptional’ but which, at the same time, has significantcontinuities with other African contexts. The authors draw for their theoreticalinspiration on concepts developed elsewhere in Africa, specifically those relatingto the way state-regulated and legal/formal economic arrangements interpenetratewith those less visible and less regulated (Hart 1973; Guyer 2004; Shipton 2007,2009, 2010). We maintain that these ideas have wider analytical purchase and canbe usefully applied – even though South Africa is a setting where wage-labourcapitalism has until recently dominated the economy (Cooper 2002: 194), andwhere state regulation and state-organized redistribution have predominated to afar greater degree than elsewhere in Africa. For while unregulated economicactivities may be more limited, less multifaceted, and increasingly more subject tothe state’s gaze than in other parts of Africa, modes for analysing them arenonetheless urgently required if we are to avoid the limitations of a singular viewof South Africa’s economy.

ANTHROPOLOGY OF ECONOMY FROM APARTHEIDTO DEMOCRACY

Although anthropologists have long been preoccupied with the relationship be-tween the divergent structures and repertoires of global- and local-level economicarrangements, a more nuanced anthropological study of economy in SouthAfrica, and one which takes account of new developments, is somewhat overdue.In the 1970s, scholars with a Marxist orientation challenged claims that thecountry’s economy was ‘dual’ (Houghton 1976) by emphasizing the articulationof divergent economic modes. Their writings nonetheless tended to reproducea sense of dis-articulation. Echoing other dualisms which have prevailed inSouth African studies, analyses concentrated less on productive than on repro-ductive activities and focused mainly on the rural subsistence economy. Althoughit was the intention to challenge liberal economists’ model of a ‘dual economy’(ibid.), anthropologists nonetheless implicitly accepted a division of academiclabour, continuing to explore subsistence and redistribution, and leaving matters

Africa 82 (1) 2012: 1–19 doi:10.1017/S0001972011000696

© International African Institute 2012

of the market and the creation and exchange of value to economists. This wasan economic arena linked to the mainstream only through the activities ofparticipants in the (stunted) ‘informal economy’ or through the mechanismof migrants’ remittances. Such remittances, dubbed ‘private redistribution’ bySeekings and Nattrass (2005), were increasingly supplanted by their ‘public’counterparts: particularly the state pension, upon which poorer people came torely as unemployment rates soared after the late 1970s.

But the sphere previously seen in structural terms as concerned with ‘repro-duction’ has been revalidated as a legitimate concern of those anthropologistsinterested in economy. Before Adam Smith coined the phrase ‘political economy’,the household was the original domain in which economy was seen as situated:there is now a call for a return to a ‘human economy’ perspective (Hann and Hart2011; Hart et al. 2010). ‘Community’ needs to be explored alongside ‘market’,claims Stephen Gudeman, and local, ‘house’-based models of the economy mustbe acknowledged as relating to, rather than being distinct from, more corporateconceptions (2001; 2010: 139). Here, too, the value of Jane Guyer’s bookMarginal Gains (2004) can be seen. She calls for a transcending of binary assump-tions in which capitalism on the one hand is counterposed against local formsof exchange which resist it on the other. Instead she calls for attention to howeconomic concepts emerge from ‘experience in the world’ (2004: 158). She asks usto explore how dynamic processes of formalization are extended ‘piecemeal’rather than uniformly and in a homogenizing manner (ibid.: 157). Formalizationand informalization thus occur in continual interaction with each other, pro-ducing a plurality. Such processes are of course particularly important in AtlanticAfrica with its relatively undeveloped character. But we argue that South Africaneconomic activities, despite being more recognizably tied to full-blown capital-ism, can benefit from a similar analysis. There are, however, importantqualifications, of which more later.

In settings where ideologies and practices of neo-liberalism have been starklyjuxtaposed with or imposed upon earlier forms of economy, whether these arecorporate-capitalist or household-based in character, it is thus a matter of urgencyto understand how these domains intersect. Using the insights of scholars likeGuyer, Gudeman and Hart, we aim on the one hand to incorporate existinganthropological concerns with the household, but on the other to develop modesof analysis that transcend ‘dual’ or ‘articulation’models. We examine how peopleinvest, safeguard or redistribute their wealth and how economic behaviour at anindividual level helps either to form or destabilize social relations and socialreproduction. In a context of increasing financialization, including attempts bythe state and the banking sector to incorporate more and more people withinmainstream financial structures, we also explore money making, both formal andinformal, beyond the household. Income inequalities and consumption practicesare areas of intense media coverage and the focus of a range of popular associ-ations and assumptions in the shaping of South Africa’s public moral discourse.Have attempts at creating a single economic framework, and incorporatingthe marginal and previously politically disenfranchised, changed the character ofinvestment and property ownership, bringing attendant problems of risk andindebtedness? How far have individuals or groups been empowered to engage inentrepreneurial activities, in the context of the new limitations or opportunitiespresented by wider economic shifts? How have these processes interacted with

2 ELIZABETH HULL AND DEBORAH JAMES

citizens’ expectations and contributed to the shaping of identities, in a settingwhere state welfarism (owing much to South Africa’s past) coexists with new, andmore classically neo-liberal, ideas of enterprise, economic independence andprivatization?

SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMY: THE BIG PICTURE

South Africa’s democratic transition in 1994 coincided with attempts by the newlyelected African National Congress (ANC) to establish a vibrant economy aimedat enticing foreign investment. Combining the economic priority of growth withthe political one of democracy confronted the new government with sometimesirreconcilable objectives: to ensure a healthy economy attractive to privateinvestors while retaining popular support (G. Hart 2002: 61; Adam et al. 1998:190). In recent years, however, this task has become increasingly difficult, withunemployment and poverty proving persistent scars on the social landscape.Making the task still more challenging, recent analyses speak of the widening gapbetween this impoverished ‘underclass’ and the privileged ‘liberation aristocracy’:a new cadre of black business-oriented elites, assisted by policies of BlackEconomic Empowerment (BEE), whose interests are closely entwined with thoseof the ruling ANC (Freund 2010: 21). Occupying an insecure middle ground is anupwardly mobile group – a new middle class (Krige 2011) –which since early2007 has suffered record levels of house and car repossessions. As part of anattempt to bring all investors, consumers, savers and spenders within the ambit ofa single economy, to regulate the activities of loan sharks and to make financialmarkets ‘work for’ the poor and the newly enfranchised, government and non-profit organizations such as the DfID-funded Finmark Trust have undertakeninitiatives to institutionalize financial arrangements that were previously per-sonalized, and to establish a single standard of value for monetary transactions.

The articles in this special issue examine the often unpredictable outcomes ofthese measures and the economic activities that take place in response to, ordespite, them, in the form of daily strategies used by different groups to generate,exchange, save and convert income. The authors explore people’s responses toa range of state-imposed conditions, in a context that is shifting increasinglytowards private investment as an overarching dogma, looking at activities thatfall both within the regulatory mechanisms of the state and outside of them, andat the ways in which the two are linked.

Many of the changes in the South African economy since the 1980s havecorresponded to wider global shifts. A process of financialization occurringglobally, linked to the economic priorities laid out in the Washington Consensus,has profoundly reshaped the relationship between society, state and market. Theprocess is characterized by an increasing dominance of financial markets andservices as a proportion of national economies, and a corresponding decline inlabour-intensive industrial growth. This trend has been replicated in South Africawhere, in the early 2000s, acquisition of financial assets rose considerably, andthe government focused its investments on the capital-intensive Mineral-Energy Complex (MEC) rather than on the dwindling manufacturing sectors.The only exception was the automobiles and components industries whichcontinue to enjoy high levels of state subsidies and tax reduction measures

3POPULAR ECONOMIES IN SOUTH AFRICA

(Marais 2011: 130–2). In addition, rather than relying on foreign debt, the govern-ment entrusted the reduction of its balance of payments deficit to capital incomegenerated through financial markets. According to Marais, this policy has been atleast as expensive as international debt would have been, and considerably morevolatile (ibid.: 132). It is this expansion via the finance sector, in the absence ofinvestment in manufacturing and production, which underlies the economy’sjobless growth observed by commentators over the last decade.

In an attempt to engender a more stable and attractive environment forinvestors, the government has attempted to bring diverse economic activities intothe formal structures of the economy, for example, by encouraging those withoutbank accounts to begin storing their money in banks. The claim is that the poorwill stand to benefit from greater financial literacy and economic interaction informal systems of money exchange and saving mechanisms. Indeed – so the argu-ment goes – it was the lack of exposure to credit and other formal banking servicesunder the stunted apartheid system which accounts for the apparent financialineptitude of a majority of South Africa’s black population today. An alternativeviewpoint might concede, however, that the failure of the banking system to caterto a large proportion of the population in the first decade of liberal democracyhad to do with private interests. These interests have shifted recently, partlybecause since around 2004 the ‘easy market’ that banks initially targeted after1994 for the offer of credit and other financial services, consisting of SouthAfrica’s formally employed, became saturated. This over-supply of such servicesto established markets, especially those which serviced the white middle class,has driven capital to move into markets that were previously regarded as ‘toorisky’ and ‘too insecure’. In search of profits, banks and lending agencies haveincreasingly also pushed their way down the socio-economic ladder into poorer,riskier, ‘gap markets’, where local populations have not had a history of formalbanking and have not historically used formal sector financial products. In somesectors, like housing, the state has also compelled formal financial institutions toprovide products for the poor (such as in the Financial Charter in the housingsector). These products provided by formal banks provide lines of credit to theblack middle and working classes, and even to welfare dependants. Porteous andHazelhurst make the point candidly: ‘now that the demand for the formally em-ployed has been all but saturated, the focus cannot but move to the informallyemployed’ (2004: 89; for a similar process in Ghana see Breckenridge 2010:649–50, 655).

This process is contradictory, however, for while the increasing reach of regu-lation is extended to this previously elusive proportion of the population –whoseactivities were viewed as occupying an ‘informal’ realm beyond the purview ofthe state – the financialization of the global economy at large, whereby the move-ments of capital have been largely freed from state regulation, indicates wide-spread informalization. This has taken place under the watch of structuraladjustment policies demanding increased fiscal control and the withdrawal ofgovernments from ‘interference’ in markets, an economic orthodoxy that hasoperated since the 1980s. As Keith Hart puts it: ‘to the extent that neo-liberalismhas succeeded in reducing state controls, the world economy itself has becomelargely an informal zone’ (Hart 2010: 152). In this sense, as Hart argues, it is moremeaningful to speak of the ‘partial institutionalization of economies’, rather thanof specific groups of people occupying a distinct ‘informal sector’ (ibid.: 150). So,


for example, there has been a proliferation of financial products created in SouthAfrica’s townships themselves, through local initiatives and schemes whichsupplement or run parallel to the credit and financial services offered through theformal banks. Beyond these, the importance of Hart’s argument is to debunk theidea that ‘informality’ can be applied exclusively to the peripheral, the unem-ployed or those in sequestered or racialized spaces. On the contrary, it proliferatesat the core of the global financial system, and at the heart of apparently ‘main-stream’ capitalist ventures in some of the peripheries of that system. In SouthAfrica, for example, the large Aurora goldmine was purchased by elites from theZuma and Mandela families with their BEE (Black Economic Empowerment)partners. In an enterprise situated at the very core of the Mineral-EnergyComplex, workers were left unpaid, staying in unmanaged compounds, living offscraps and later beginning to engage in informal, artisanal mining. Informality,in this and other cases, is neither a throwback to some earlier pre-capitalist past,nor an accidental fallout from a dominant structure, but is the result of intentionalretractions of government regulation.

The global credit crunch that began in 2008, and the domino effect of nationalrecessions that followed it, profoundly disrupted any notion that the financialsystems governing international capital regimes are stable and coherent. Activitiesthat received heightened media attention in the months following, such as com-pany tax avoidance, off-shore banking and financial speculation, are instancesof the global economic informalization to which Hart refers. Furthermore,following the global economic crisis, there are fewer plausible avenues for con-cealing this fact. Recent political lobbying by banks against state regulation hasbeen exposed. An article in the Guardian newspaper reports that during theWorldEconomic Forum of January 2011, banks complained about ‘undue punishment’in the form of the threat of regulatory reform. The chief executive of internationalinvestment bank JP Morgan is reported to have ‘snapped . . . that banks were notprepared to simply “bend over and accept it” from regulators’.1 While pressure isplaced on developing economies to create suitable climates for investors by for-malizing and monitoring economic transactions, as in South Africa, governmentshave conceded to the pressure of private capital to allow its free, unregulatedmovement.

Given the decision to open the economy to promote foreign investment, SouthAfrica has been described as ‘one of the largest and most deregulated [economies]within the emerging markets’ (Economist Intelligence Unit, quoted in Marais2011: 132). In South Africa, one of the outcomes of deregulation was the excessivelending of credit to consumers during the 1990s. As in America and Britain, theeconomic growth of the South African economy during this period and into theearly 2000s was fuelled by an unsustainable credit boom, leading to increasinglevels of indebtedness. Porteous and Hazelhurst sum up the relationship betweenprivate capital and the government during this period, saying that ‘privateinterests drove very rapid expansion in access to credit; and the state spent muchof the remainder of the decade trying to limit the fall-out’ (2004: 85). Thus somemeasures were put in place – albeit largely in hindsight – to curb the rapacious

1‘Davos summit leaves David Cameron and George Osborne feeling bruised’, The Guardian,29 January 2011.


credit extension practices of the 1990s: notably, the National Credit Act of 2007.Some commentators argue that the worst effects of the crisis in South Africa wereavoided due to the introduction of these regulations, providing banks with somedegree of protection from external pressures.2 Figures suggest, however, that thenegative impact of global recession has been considerable (Marais 2011: 145–7).As unemployment increased in South Africa, it became increasingly clear, andimpossible for the government to deny, that South Africa’s fortuitous period ofgrowth had drawn to a swift close: an acknowledgement that accompaniedgrowing anxiety and economic insecurity among many South Africans.

In his State of the Nation address early in 2010, President Jacob Zumaacknowledged the soaring unemployment rates in South Africa and linked theseto the global crisis. By doing so, however, he also implicitly diverted attentionfrom a much deeper historical trajectory of systemic unemployment that finds itsroots in the apartheid policies of labour market intervention in the 1970s and that,in fact, has deepened since the inception of liberal democracy in 1994 (Seekingsand Nattrass 2005). The measures that he declared would help to reverse theeffects of the recession were mostly under way already, namely supporting themotor industry and MEC. This is one instance in which a particular view ofhistory is conveyed in order to shift the moral terrain of political debate in thepresent. Other instances hinge on attempts to emphasize a radical break with theapartheid past. The articles in this special issue examine the historical trajectoriesthat have been forged in South Africa’s public moral discourse, either inten-tionally or implicitly, and how these shape particular understandings of thepresent or how they reveal or conceal, in particular, features of social andeconomic relationships that often arise out of more complex developments overtime.

What are these historical trajectories, and in what way are continuities with thepresent in evidence? An important legacy of the pre-1994 era is the considerableextent of state spending. Despite the much-criticized shift from an initiallyredistributive to a more growth-oriented policy in the wake of the seconddemocratic elections, South Africa has been characterized as a ‘distributionalregime’ given the mediation of these effects by state spending (Seekings andNattrass 2005). Although its expenditure on grants and welfare – at under 4 percent of GDP – is small in comparison to the Nordic countries, South Africa’s statespending is generous by developing country standards: it distributes millionsof rand each year in the form of grants and pensions. While thus possessingsome of the character of post-socialist Europe’s ‘millennial capitalism’, it has beendistinguished, both during and since apartheid, by such spending and by theaccompanying sense of citizen insistence – and dependency – upon this (Bähre2011). Liberal trade and self-enrichment combine with government interventionin often unexpected ways: a fact acknowledged by Ferguson, who points out thatsuch rises in social spending – in South Africa as in Brazil – have much to do withthe ‘contingencies of democratic politics’ (2009: 171; 2007).

2Miles Donohoe, ‘What the credit crunch means for South Africa’, Trade Invest South Africawebsite, 22 October 2008, <http://www.tradeinvestsa.co.za/feature_articles/843629.htm>, ac-cessed 3 August 2011.


http://www.tradeinvestsa.co.za/feature_articles/843629.htm

http://www.tradeinvestsa.co.za/feature_articles/843629.htm

A second legacy concerns the way in which state regulation during apartheidlimited entrepreneurial activities by Africans, especially small-scale ones arisingout of the ‘informal sector’. Their stultification was inevitable in racially segre-gated areas where state planning was pervasive, where few Africans were grantedtrading licences, and where Indian shop owners benefited both from restrictionson African business and from the racial legislation which prevented penetrationby white businessmen (Hart and Padayachee 2000; Krige 2011; Kuper 1965: 76,261–89; Seekings and Nattrass 2005: 142). Although some merchants haveprofited from the lifting of these restrictions and transformed their approachto business, many commentators suggest that the uneven or dualistic legacy ofapartheid remains. The articles consider what opportunities do exist, however,and in what ways these make use of, or are limited by, particular social andeconomic arrangements in which the imprint of past inequalities may be evident.They explore ethnographically the contradictory character of a society in whichstrong state intervention dovetails, and is increasingly required in order to keepthe economy in alignment, with a neo-liberal market orientation.

POPULAR ECONOMIES

The period between 2008 and 2010 was a judicious moment to explore existingand emerging economic arrangements, given the challenges – both economicand ideological – brought to the fore by the global financial crisis. Whileacknowledging that a notion like ‘informality’ remains crucial in order to enableus to capture non-regulated spheres of activity, we treat with caution the formal/informal dichotomy, given the necessarily state-centric focus that gives rise tosuch a dualism (Roitman 1990). As Keith Hart – to whom the term is originallycredited – points out, the concept of informality posits such activities negativelyvis-à-vis the formal sphere. It ‘acknowledges a world outside the bureaucracy, butendows it with no positive identity’ (Hart 2001: 156). Several anthropologists andhistorians began to take up the challenge of describing economic behaviour ina more detailed way, resulting in the emergence of a literature that embracedthe idea of ‘multiple livelihoods’ as a key defining characterization, referring tothe combination of formal employment with other types of income generationincluding farming, petty trade, remittances and, in South Africa, governmentgrants (Francis 2000; Murray 2002). These contributions to the debate aboutinformality challenged the erroneous labelling of individuals according toseparate categories of ‘employed’, ‘unemployed’, ‘farmer’, ‘worker’ and so on.They also conveyed the diversity of various practices in which different groupsengaged.

However, others have criticized the view emerging from some of the livelihoodsliterature that ‘flexibility and improvisation should be celebrated’ (Francis2000: 21). The positive slant given to informal activities, they argue, obscuresthe fact that they are generated out of necessity and the need for survival, in apolitical and social context that is structurally skewed to their disadvantage(ibid.; Marais 2011: 221). Celebrating the ingenuity of informal activities risksfuelling ‘neo-liberal’ dogma that embraces ideas of ‘vibrant civil society’,‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘self-help’, implicitly endorsing the withdrawal of stateresponsibility for citizens’ welfare and suppressing more radical claims to state-led


redistribution (ibid.: 223).3 In similar vein, Ferguson notes the extent to whicheven NGO officers deploy arguments suggesting that the informal economy andhigh unemployment are here to stay, thus removing an important aspect of socialdemocratic arguments that remain committed to the idea of social change, pro-gress and equality (2007). Indeed, the rhetoric surrounding the ‘second economy’,a term popularized by the former Mbeki government in plain ignorance of theextensive historical debate which questions the validity of the ‘dual economy’concept, has fuelled this positive twist on informality, which has come to be seenas a potential untapped resource to be brought under more rigorous control andutilized as a poverty-reduction tool.

What is particular about informality in the South African context has to dowith the extent and depth of capitalist development and accumulation which, overthe course of the twentieth century, exceeded its equivalent in any other part ofthe African continent. Land and resources were widely and effectively broughtunder the ownership of a white minority. Under apartheid, the expulsion ofAfricans to rural ‘homelands’ undermined and often eradicated the possibilityof rural families eking out a living through farming, while heavy reliance onurban industry through the remittances of migrant workers was indicative of aneconomy increasingly driven by wage labour. This process of incorporation into adominant capitalist system has been more pervasive than in other parts of thecontinent. As Frederick Cooper writes: ‘Wage-labor capitalism, in most of Africa,takes place on islands in a sea of other sorts of socio-economic relations; inSouth Africa, wage-labor capitalism pervades the economy’ (2002: 194). Giventhe (former) ubiquity of wage-labour capitalism, unemployment has become afocus of intense public anxiety, and represents the social crisis of an historic shiftfrom a situation of labour demand (that characterized the rapid industrializationof South Africa) to that of widespread labour over-supply. It remains the casethat the main routes to enrichment are through formal, public-sector or privateemployment, despite an ideological shift in recent years to acknowledging,celebrating and attempting to encourage the ‘entrepreneurialism’ of those strivingto generate cash in the interstices of this dominant system. This historical legacy,then, has underpinned the incentive to further standardize economic behaviour,providing dominant assumptions about the nature of accumulation which renderinformal types of work either problematic or structurally invisible. Alternatively,as mentioned above, it renders such work subject to inclusion in a policy discourseabout the ‘second economy’.

The analytical separation of the formal from the informal can be challenged,not only on the grounds that they are interlinked economically as Hart, Guyer,and others have shown, but because it relies on a notion of state governance andbureaucratic form as distinct and contained, rather than as a blurred and disputedterrain: ‘everyday forms of state power . . . are always suffused with and mediatedby politics: contestation of authority, open defiance, as well as attempts to divertor privatize resources’ (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2005: 9). While exploringareas that are often below the radar of the state and of capitalist enterprise, we

3This argument echoes earlier neo-Marxist critique of the ‘informality’ concept, for examplePortes and Walton 1981.


aim to escape from such binaries and policy discourses by favouring the term‘popular economies’. This recognizes the legacy, in South Africa, of earlier studiesof popular culture which described a world of new identities and activities locatedin the city, where people had newly come into contact. Everyday survivalstrategies of the poor such as beer brewing and other economic activities wereanalysed, as well as forms of popular resistance, ritual and the like (Edwards1989; La Hausse 1988). What made this domain ‘popular’ was its hybridcharacter, its inventiveness and creativity, and the way it relied on particularlyinventive ‘brokers’ – even crooks and tricksters – for its operation (Barber 1987;La Hausse 1993; James 2011). The term thus stresses the embeddedness ofeconomic practices and institutions in broader cultural milieux; their reliance onideas about luck, fortune, fate and the like; and the way they speak to dreams ofwealth, equality, and the future. The articles in this volume both analyse the newways in which popular economies mesh with regulated and partially regulatedzones of economic exchange, and how economic transactions are implicated inprocesses of political articulation or discontent, and in the shaping of new andemergent identities.

A recent literature, addressing such cultural perspectives in particular, stressesthe quasi-magical manner in which economic transactions may be experienced.The illusory and intangible aspects are foregrounded, with the proliferationof covert and transient flows of money, via such shadowy practices as offshorebanking, financial speculation and a host of risk-taking activities includinggambling, pyramid and insurance schemes, seen as engendering a sense of vulner-ability and mystification about value exchange, expressed through a correspond-ing explosion of witchcraft and ‘occult economies’ (Comaroff and Comaroff1999; 2000; cf. Shaw 1997; Geschiere 1999). While not denying the relevance ofsuch insights, we find Guyer’s (2004) and Shipton’s (2007, 2010) work useful inhelping to shift attention away from the mystificatory, even ‘occult’, nature ofmoney, exchange and economies, and towards a focus on their pragmatic andexperience-based aspects.

The ongoing debate regarding the embeddedness vs abstraction of money isaddressed by Guyer, who shows that money converts social value and hierarchy,whilst also pegging that value vis-à-vis other values. This approach gives rise toan emphasis on money transfers and conversions as involving a plurality offormalizations, and offers an escape from the simple dualism of informal/formal,or from an idea that one must move inexorably towards the other (2004).Similarly instructive is Parker Shipton’s recent trilogy of books on the generaltopic of ‘entrustment’ (2007, 2009, 2010). He neither sees economic matters asseparate from other aspects of life, nor, contrarily, emphasizes the need to‘embed’ them in social matters. Instead, he gives an account of lending, mort-gaging, debt and credit in the social world of the Luo, by widening the field toinclude obligations between generations, paybacks between the living and thedead, and a broad range of scenarios not normally thought of in connection withexchange or ‘money’ in the strictest sense. In his account, Luo, while duty-boundto sustain and respect whatever responsibilities they may incur towards others, aredepicted as having some freedom to opt for – or to choose against –more or lessformally financially framed versions of these obligations. One gains the im-pression from these authors that, in West and East Africa, exchanges andconversions between monetary and non-monetary values do not mystify people.


Rather, they both broadly obey local logics and involve some degree of choice onthe part of individual actors.

It is here that our articles indicate some divergence in South Africa from theseinsights into plural (in)formalizations or forms of entrustment in other parts ofAfrica. Proletarianization and incorporation as consumers into the world ofcorporate capitalism occurred in South Africa more comprehensively, and muchearlier, than in other African countries, even though such processes were unevenin character. In addition, the virtually monopolistic penetration of particularbrands – furniture, foodstuffs, soap powders, toothpaste, beer – into the raciallyseparated zones of the township was achieved relatively swiftly, resulting in anextremely monolithic consumer culture which extended throughout the countryand was remarkably similar whether in township or rural village. Additionalpressures with the advent of rapid upward mobility since democratization in 1994have exacerbated this brand penetration while adding new, more up-marketnames and products. Competition between neighbours has driven many deep intodebt. Alongside this, a vast redistributive system of grants and pensions staves offthe worst extremes of poverty visible elsewhere on the continent, also reinforcingthe pervasiveness of the state-regulated economy. The drive towards economic‘informalization’ which such forms of capital penetration paradoxically prompt isoften less a matter of choice, and more a matter of necessity, than it appears to bein some of the other African settings described above.

The South African picture bears a closer resemblance, then, to the situationdescribed by Kate Meagher in Nigeria, in which a swift process of economicformalization, intended to close the gap between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ econ-omies by way of a rapid implementation of extensive business regulations, hashad the opposite effect, pushing more people and businesses into covert andinformal practices even while greater dependence on a formal economy has meantfewer income-generating alternatives, especially in comparison to other countriesin which cash economies are more encompassing (Meagher 2010, especiallyChapter 4). In her study, as in ours, these structural frameworks do not entirelydetermine economic action, and there remains of course some freedom to engagein transactions of the kind that only an ‘actor-centred perspective’ can illuminate(Long 2001). But these structures and the historical trajectories that underpinthem also play some role in undermining the kind of trust that might make formore concerted, community-oriented responses to the domineering forces ofcapitalism ‘from above’ (Bähre 2007). While such structures and histories havecertainly underpinned the creation of new ‘enterprise cultures’ from below, theyalso play a role in inhibiting the full development of these, in line with earlierapartheid-era trajectories. In short, they create a setting where choice is limited,and where monolithic trends seem to compel forms of social and economic actionrather than leaving these wide open to individual ingenuity.

RESEARCH METHODS AND FINDINGS

All but one of the researchers whose work is presented here were participants in aproject funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC); theremaining one, Maxim Bolt, conducted doctoral research under a separate rubric,but also funded by the ESRC. Paying careful attention to the continued existence


of racially spatialized settings, the project effectively restricted itself to Africanareas of the kind explored in previous anthropological studies, although alsoexploring the movement of the occupants of such areas into new spaces. It com-prised a range of studies in different but linked geographical/socio-politicalcontexts. The researchers, having previously worked in their fieldsites – oftenmultiple ones – on earlier projects, had extensive knowledge of them which theybrought to bear on the new investigation. Their existing experience fed into theformulation of research questions about popular economy. The answering ofthese questions required, in some cases, that interview data be privileged overparticipant observation; and that multi-sited examples predominate over a morethorough knowledge of one particular locale. Nevertheless, researchers’ existingknowledge of these settings allowed them to circumvent – if not entirely ade-quately deal with – questions of representativity, and of the validity of inference.Rather than using case studies to serve merely as ‘apt illustrations’, ethnographicvignettes and examples were, in the manner of the Manchester school, located in awider context ‘which in turn impose[s] constraints on the actions of theprotagonists in the case study’ (Evens and Handelman 2006: 27). Attending tothis ‘wider context’, researchers moved beyond specific locales to direct attentionto policy discourses and the pronouncements of agents within the state, thecorporate sector, and the world of charitable and non-governmental organiz-ations. Whether in relation to gambling in the lottery, to problems of indebted-ness, or to scandals about the unwarranted awarding of ‘tenders’ to political alliesor cronies, South African life is extensively commented upon and discussed bypolitical actors and activists, and matters are widely reported in the press. Duringethnographic research, attention to this wider set of discussions formed animportant backdrop to the case study material. Also underpinning this attentionto policy questions and commentary, and evident particularly in the articles byHull, Neves and du Toit, James, and van Wyk, was the ESRC’s requirement thatresearchers be seen to have ‘impact’ within the wider, non-academic community.Aspects of the arguments in these articles were developed in preparation forpresentation to the banking, journalist, insurance and business community at a‘dissemination workshop’ in Johannesburg, in September 2010, and some ofthe articles are explicitly concerned to provide refutation of, or at least nuanceto, state- or market-driven ideologies: for example, about problem gambling(van Wyk), the horrors of debt (James), the irrationality of investing in pyramidschemes (Krige), and other matters.

Six researchers worked in city settings (Bähre; James; Krige; Neves anddu Toit; van Wyk), three in former homeland areas (Hull; James; McNeill), andone on a white farm on the South Africa/Zimbabwe border (Bolt). Two studiescross-cut rural/urban polarities, with James investigating the interrelationsbetween a rural periphery – in the province of Mpumalanga – of the metropolitanhub of Gauteng/Johannesburg, while Neves and du Toit explored two closelyrelated settings in the rural Eastern Cape and the metropolitan Western Cape.

Indebtedness in the post-democracy era is the focus of Deborah James’s article.Debt is incurred not just through profligacy but for long-term investment,especially in higher education, but exhaustion of formal credit channels promptscivil servant borrowers to turn to loansharks, themselves state employees. Socialembeddedness, she shows, thus exacerbates middle-class overindebtedness,impedes upward mobility, and can be conducive to ‘rent-seeking’ behaviour.


Livelihoods beyond state employ and/or moneylending are restricted by dualeconomy legacies. Consumers intensify reliance on funeral and savings clubs.Expanding beyond ‘saving’, and responding creatively to the perceived predationsof formal credit providers, these clubs lend out money at interest but are, in turn,vulnerable to borrowers’ non-repayment. Complex flows of money, and patternsof exchange and indebtedness, defy the static labelling of individuals as either‘borrowers’ or ‘lenders’. Contrary to common conceptions of indebtedness as asign of irresponsible spending or lack of financial aptitude, becoming indebted isin fact difficult to avoid, not least for those whose strategies for wealth ac-cumulation aspire beyond levels of mere survival. As anthropologist Polly Hillshowed during her research in the 1960s on the rural Hausa of Nigeria (1972),indebtedness is not experienced by the poorest people who cannot afford toborrow, but by those with some possibility of economic advancement. Indeed,James argues, it is difficult to be upwardly mobile without getting into debt. Shecriticizes many of the assumptions that inform popular understandings ofeconomic behaviour, and that undergird policies aimed at standardizing informalactivities. One of these is the idea that, with improved education, people willbehave in a more ‘rational’ way and will more easily access the benefits of formalfinancial arrangements. People are becoming indebted not because they lackeducation but rather because they are willing to pay for the privileges that edu-cation endows: and because it is the best or only financial option. The apparentlack of political outrage around issues of indebtedness and house repossessionshas to do with a moral discomfort associated with being in debt, that leads to itbeing suppressed or hidden from the public eye. As people negotiate theirindebtedness, then, they also negotiate wider questions of identity and their socialrelationships with others, in a moral economy fuelled partly, but not only, by adesire for material gain.

Similarly challenging the media-fuelled speculation that poor South Africansbehave in irresponsible or ‘irrational’ ways because they lack the financial know-how to make better decisions is Ilana van Wyk’s article. Writing about practicesof, and attitudes towards, gambling, she argues that gambling is often seen as atype of work alongside other limited income opportunities. With James, shepoints out that the ‘culture of immediate gratification’ – blamed for fuelling aproliferation in gambling in South Africa – is not an immature and opportunisticresponse of black people to the freedoms bestowed upon them by liberaldemocracy. Rather, the pursuit of status through material and financial gain has alongue durée in South Africa, as earlier anthropological literature on the rise ofthe African bourgeoisie demonstrates (for example, Kuper 1965; Brandel-Syrier1978). Despite the consensus in public moral discourse (and in high economictheory for that matter) that gambling is a foolishly risky pursuit unlikely to yieldreward, van Wyk appeals for a more contextual understanding of risk. In anenvironment characterized by generalized economic insecurity, gambling cannotbe singled out as separate from other income streams, which are also highlyunreliable and precarious. Thus, for the Cape Town residents interviewed by vanWyk, many other forms of potential income generation fitted equally, or evenmore aptly, into the category of ‘taking a chance’.

Also engaging with the moral economy of gambling, extended to includepyramid schemes and insurance services, both formal and informal, is the articleby Detlev Krige. Such forms of risk taking, he argues, have become popular in the


context of unfulfilled expectations, increasing disparities in wealth, and a longhistory of class aspiration that took shape under colonial and apartheid govern-ments. With van Wyk, he rejects the assumption that participants in theseactivities lack sufficient knowledge, restraint or rationalizing capabilities, arguingthat the popularity of such schemes is rooted in a broader trend of financializationin the South African economy, and mirrors the risk taking and speculationcharacterizing the higher echelons of global finance. Through the lens ofthree South African women, all serial participants in such schemes, Krigedescribes the complex and often contradictory motivations and explanations thataccompany these activities, and that express fundamental tensions at the heart ofSouth Africa’s moral economy between ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘imminent doom’,risk taking and predictability, entrepreneurship and greed. The irreconcilablenature of these tensions is conveyed through the ‘bewildering’ array ofsuch volatile financial activities that are the product, not the antithesis, offinancialization.

One activity through which people in South Africa’s formerly sequestered andracialized spaces have long sought to make a living is informal music production.Fraser McNeill describes a struggle faced by musicians between musical self-expression and economic need, in a context in which avenues for generatingincome – the formal music industry and tender-driven performance at govern-ment shows – place implicit restrictions on politically subversive lyrics. His articletells the story of how Colbert Mukwevho, renowned reggae artist from the formerhomeland of Venda whose passion for reggae had a politicizing influence duringhis formative years growing up in apartheid South Africa, learnt to temper hislyrics during the 1980s for fear of retribution under an oppressive apartheidsystem of censorship. Yet even after the end of apartheid, his third album,Doomsday – a more open critique of post-apartheid governance –was rejected bythe CCP record label on the grounds that it was ‘a threat to national unity’.Today, performances at government shows are the only way for informalmusicians to earn a reasonable income; but most have learnt that to do so theymust avoid songs with political content. Musicians are thus compelled to sacrifice‘artistic freedom’ for the sake of ‘economic gain’. Musical content thus undergoes‘regulation’, despite occupying an informal space. With James, Krige andvan Wyk, then, McNeill demonstrates continuity with apartheid era norms.In this instance, the government evades the formalized political principles ofdemocracy – it can no longer simply ban songs as did the apartheid regime – bycovert manipulation of economic relations via the partially informalized systemof tenders. The moral onus, furthermore, is transferred to the musiciansthemselves who undergo a process of self-censorship while engaging in ongoingstruggles to maintain professional and creative integrity alongside economicsurvival.

The interconnections between formal and informal economies are explored byMaxim Bolt. His study was conducted on a farm in northern Limpopo, situateddirectly adjacent to the border fence that separates South Africa from its neigh-bour Zimbabwe. Many of the farm’s employees are Zimbabwean immigrants.Bolt begins with a critique of existing literature on border politics, arguing thatthe emphasis on the distinction between legal and illegal (encouraged by thedominance of state presence in border areas) obfuscates other distinctions inincome-generating practices – such as that between formal employment on the


farm and informal activities –which are more central to understanding economicdynamics in the area. Exaggerating the significance of the border in physicalterms, he argues, also risks drowning out other ‘spatial logics’: the position of thefarm far from town, for example, is significant in influencing the informaleconomic activities of its employees. Far from being a desirable end-point, heargues, formal employment is often merely a strategy that assists the establish-ment of individual businesses. The two mesh together in interesting ways. Forexample, the particular ‘wage rhythms’ of the farm enable a system of credit todevelop in relation to the informal supply of goods. In addition, it is the timeflexibility of informal retail, in contrast to the fixed opening hours of the com-pound shop, that enables its successful operation. Informal commerce capitalizeson the rigidity of formal structures, thriving off these while maximizing its owncompetitive niche of flexible work hours. Hence, Bolt argues, although thetemporal and spatial arrangements of formal structures place limitations oninformal income creation, they may also be translated into opportunities.

Where Bolt explores these matters in one particular setting, David Neves andAndries du Toit offer a comparative view of several case studies drawn fromdifferent contexts. They emphasize the plural and uneven nature of informalities,and challenge the assumed centrality of the state, arguing that such activitiestypically fall under ‘overlapping, concentric rings of authority and governance’.These include, in addition to government regulation, chiefly systems of authorityand locally defined rules – the ‘social imperatives’ – of particular areas or groups.A local ‘taxi van’ association is one example: while non-statutory, it demandspaid membership from drivers in that particular locale. One implication is that‘the state is far from assured a monopoly of violence’. Yet the picture is diverse.In another example Neves and du Toit show how formal structures can block offinformal opportunities for income creation. A new Japanese minibus taxi,introduced through a government recapitalization programme, reduces the remitof work provided by untrained mechanics because of the specialist electronicequipment it requires. As Neves and du Toit reveal, in this instance ‘theexclusionary potential of formality inheres in a combination of both regulatorychange and technological “lock out”’.

An expanding area of ‘formal’ economic activity, both in the sense of making aliving and of keeping insecurity at bay, is that of insurance. Erik Bähre’s articlediscusses insurance companies’ use of brokers as a mechanism for gaining accessto an otherwise impenetrable market of the non-formally employed. Brokers areexpected to make use of their own social networks in order to recruit clients andgenerate investment. Far from representing a distinct sphere in contrast to the‘socially embedded’ world of informality, the formal sector actually makes use ofexisting social relations and networks to extend its reach beyond the typical remit.This provides an interesting comparison with Bolt’s article, in which the emphasisis on the way that informal actors make use of formal systems; here, the oppositeis the case. It is also an interesting counterpoint to Neves and du Toit’s example ofJapanese taxis, where formal regulations shut down other possibilities. In con-trast, registered insurance companies depend upon the social networks that aremost often associated with informal enterprise. The article draws attention to theidea of the invisibility of the formal sector, which is an important inversion ofthe state-centric perspective in which informality is positioned beyond the gaze ofthe state, and hence is invisible. This was conveyed in the example of Shumikazi,


who decided not to tell her clients she had switched to working for an insurancecompany, a decision that became problematic when the company raised itsmonthly fee, which required her to pass on the extra cost to them. The idea ofinvisibility is also conveyed in Bähre’s description of opaque bureaucraticprocedures, the complexities and intentional inconsistencies of which render itextremely difficult to make insurance claims.

The theme of visibility is addressed by Elizabeth Hull, who argues that theaesthetics of ‘formality’ are appealing and sought-after. Using the example of amicrofinance initiative in rural KwaZulu-Natal, Hull shows how members’expectations of the bank are formed in response to the history of their own partialand intermittent experiences of local development initiatives, loaning schemes,government institutions and personal financial strategies. Arguing that formalityis experienced and viewed by the bank’s members as a set of material, aesthetic,technological and bureaucratic qualities, Hull explains that members desired andexpected the community bank to acquire the same signifiers. The ongoingcreation of the bank as a credible institution was challenged by this comparison aswell as by existing mistrust in such initiatives, and the delay that membersexperienced while waiting, indefinitely, for credit. Hull demonstrates that thesearch for formality is not inconsequential, but concretely influences the financialpractices of members. The degree of formality perceived to have been acquired bythe microfinance bank influenced their decision to invest in it or not –which,ultimately, was to affect their ability to access loans. The article illustrates thatdelay and waiting are ubiquitous experiences in such contexts, and focuses thelens on the economic activities and moral narratives that emerge in the interim. Incontrast to Bolt’s article in which formality is less desirable than informalpractices of money making, Hull found that formality was a sought-after valueand an index of citizen expectations, a form of consumption that shapes identitiesin the creation of what Achille Mbembe referred to as a ‘performance ofworldliness’ (2004: 374).

In sum, the articles in this volume demonstrate that formalities are uneven; andthat their coexistence with informalities often intensifies as poorer and wealthierpeople attempt to develop redistributive networks. Whatever shape is taken byentrepreneurial activity, it often relies on wages, as with farm workers (Bolt) or onstate- or non-state regulatory processes, as with petty traders and artisans (Nevesand du Toit). Alternatively, or in addition, it may depend on the notorious‘government tender’ system, which then becomes the economic basis of an entireindustry and its profits, as with reggae musicians (McNeill). However, trust inregulated activities may exist for primarily affective reasons, as with communitybank members who valued the aesthetic and bureaucratic qualities characteristicof high-street banks, without which investors were put off and their ability toaccess loans affected (Hull).

Citizen action, such as strikes by trade unions or service delivery protests,involves demands for wage hikes or improved government performance, but tendsto omit all mention of indebtedness. Substituting for collective campaigns, andbecause of consumer reluctance to ‘share experiences’, the individualized adviceoffered by NGOs turns ‘citizen’ into ‘consumer’ rights (James).

Risk taking, and consumer pursuit of status through material gain and formalcredit-agency avoidance, originate in dual economy legacies, with their unfulfilledexpectations, wealth disparities and frustrated class aspiration. Gambling is not


about ‘immediate gratification’ but is seen as a type of ‘work’ alongside otherlimited and precarious income opportunities (van Wyk), and participants inpyramid schemes have ideologies combining ‘progress’ with ‘imminent doom’,entrepreneurship with greed: contradictory attitudes reflective of financializationin the broader world (Krige).

Overall, economic inequality is on the increase, causing risk aversion to com-bine unevenly with enterprise. Unregulated burial societies proliferate, encour-aging investment to hedge against such risk; formal insurance offers greatersecurity while providing employment for local brokers/salespeople (Bähre), but‘reinsurance’ arrangements often fail.

People of divergent status or class backgrounds all seek to access largesse fromthe state using informal or innovative means. South Africa thus has neither a‘neo-liberal’ nor ‘redistributive’ regime; rather, neo-liberal means interweave withand facilitate redistributive ends.

CONCLUSION

A reader of the South African newspapers could be forgiven for constructing asomewhat monolithic narrative. Neo-liberal change has seen members of the newmiddle class become increasingly individualized, compete fiercely with each other,and confine their passions to the purchase of consumer items in a kind of madpotlatch, while those further down the ladder struggle simply to stay alive, relyinglargely on state handouts in order to do so. Everything seems to be ‘for sale’ in asetting where civil society is on the wane, replaced by churches that promote anew prosperity gospel for yuppies while offering some solace to the poor. Whilefor the very few these upward trajectories may be enabled by financial formality,many others are blocked, with the promise of a prosperous lifestyle receding everfurther into the distance.

An alternative account, prompted by the insights of writers such as Shiptonand Guyer, mitigates this by pointing to the social embeddedness of mon-etary exchange, the existence of local logics of transaction and the availabilityof choice – albeit a restricted choice, given both the strongly state-governedand resolutely market-oriented character of post-transition South Africansociety – about how and where to convert between registers. Local logics ofconversion and investment drive people to rank monetized exchanges againstmoral/personal transactions both within and beyond households, weighing themup against each other. Petty entrepreneurs can eat their stock and, conversely, usefamily labour to help their trade. Women, separated from their husbands andopting to reconnect to their natal families, can be torn between securing their‘customary obligations’ to these kinsmen, and involvement in seemingly for-malized financial arrangements such as mortgages. Upwardly mobile peoplestriving to manage financialized products can be doubly entangled with off-the-radar moneylenders. The few who have well-paid or salaried positionsexperience intensifying obligations and responsibilities: they may be expected tohelp educate siblings’ children, while simultaneously strategizing to remainbeyond the obligations of marriage and the reach of prospective in-laws.

The articles in this volume show how these apparently divergent narratives ofindividualized excess and moral obligation intertwine, in complex and unexpected


ways, for people caught between what modernity promises on the one hand andthe disruptive realities it delivers on the other.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors acknowledge the funding of this research project by a grant from the Economicand Social Research Council of the UK (award RES-062-23-1290). We also thank allmembers of the team who participated in the various workshops (and commented on earlierdrafts of this introduction), and commentators who presented at or participated in thoseworkshops, including Catherine Alexander, Sophie Chevalier, Nic Dawes, Penny Hawkins,Marlene Heymans, Rebekah Lee, Sam Masinga, Robert Ross, Krishen Sukdev, StuartTheobald, and Louise Whittaker. Special acknowledgement to Keith Hart for beinggenerous with his advice and support throughout this project. Thanks too to Linda Mabin,Liz Gunner, Belinda Bozzoli and all the staff at WISER (Wits Institute of Social andEconomic Research), who helped to facilitate the final workshop in South Africa.Proceedings of all three workshops can be viewed at <http://www2.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/research/popular_economies/popular_economies.aspx>.

Finally, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Africa. Opinionsexpressed are the authors’ own.

REFERENCES

Adam, H., F. van Zyl Slabbert and K. Moodley (1998) Comrades in Business:post-liberation politics in South Africa. Utrecht: International Books.

Bähre, E. (2007)Money and Violence: financial self-help groups in a South Africantownship. Leiden: Brill.

——– (2011) ‘Liberation and redistribution: social grants, commercial insurance,and religious riches in South Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 53 (2): 371–92.

Barber, K. (1987) ‘Popular arts in Africa’, African Studies Review 3 (30): 1–78.Blom Hansen, T. and F. Stepputat (2005) ‘Introduction’ in T. Blom Hansen and

F. Stepputat (eds), Sovereign Bodies: citizens, migrants, and states in thepostcolonial world. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Brandel-Syrier, M. (1978) ‘Coming Through’: the search for a new culturalidentity. Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Breckenridge, K. (2010) ‘The world’s first biometric money: Ghana’s E-Zwichand the contemporary influence of South African biometrics’, Africa 80 (4):642–62.

Comaroff, J. and J. L. Comaroff (1999) ‘Occult economies and the violence ofabstraction: notes from the South African postcolony’, American Ethnologist26 (2): 279–303.

——– (2000) ‘Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming’, PublicCulture 12 (2): 291–343.

Cooper, F. (2002) Africa since 1940: the past of the present. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Edwards, I. (1989) ‘Mkhumbane Our Home: African shantytown society in CatoManor farm, 1946–1960.’ PhD thesis, University of Natal, Durban.

Evens, T. M. S. and D. Handelman (2006) The Manchester School: practice andethnographic praxis in anthropology. New York NY: Berghahn.


http://www2.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/research/popular_economies/popular_economies.aspx



Ferguson, J. (2007) ‘Formalities of poverty: thinking about social assistance inneoliberal South Africa’, African Studies Review 50 (2): 71–86.

——– (2009) ‘The uses of neoliberalism’, Antipode 41 (s1): 166–84.Francis, E. (2000) Making a Living: changing livelihoods in rural Africa. London:

Routledge.Freund, B. (2010) ‘The significance of the Minerals-Energy Complex in the

light of South African economic historiography’, Transformation: CriticalPerspectives on Southern Africa 71: 3–25.

Geschiere, P. (1999) ‘Globalization and the power of indeterminate meaning:witchcraft and spirit cults in Africa and East Asia’ in B. Meyer andP. Geschiere (eds), Globalization and Identity: dialectics of flow and closure.Oxford: Blackwell.

Gudeman, S. (2001) The Anthropology of Economy. Oxford: Blackwell.——– (2010) ‘A cosmopolitan anthropology?’ in D. James, C. Toren and E. Plaice

(eds), Culture Wars: context, models, and anthropologists’ accounts. New YorkNY: Berghahn.

Guyer, J. (2004) Marginal Gains: monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa.Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hann, C. and K. Hart (2011) Economic Anthropology: history, ethnography,critique. Cambridge: Polity.

Hart, G. (2002) Disabling Globalisation: places of power in post-apartheidSouth Africa. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Hart, K. (1973) ‘Informal income opportunities and urban employment inGhana’, Journal of Modern African Studies 11 (1): 61–89.

——– (2001) The Memory Bank: money in an unequal world. London: Texere.——– (2010) ‘Informal economy’ in K. Hart, J. Laville and A. D. Cattani (eds),

The Human Economy: a citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity.Hart, K., J. Laville and A. D. Cattani (2010) ‘Building the human economy

together’ in K. Hart, J. Laville and A. D. Cattani (eds), The Human Economy:a citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity.

Hart, K. and V. Padayachee (2000) ‘Indian business in South Africa afterapartheid: old and new trajectories’, Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 42 (4): 683–712.

Hill, P. (1972) Rural Hausa: a village and a setting. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Houghton, H. (1976) The South African Economy. Cape Town: OxfordUniversity Press.

James, D. (2011) ‘The return of the broker: consensus, hierarchy and choicein South African land reform’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute17 (2): 318–38.

Krige, D. (2011) ‘Power, Identity and Agency at Work in the Popular Economiesof Soweto and Black Johannesburg’. D.Phil thesis, University of theWitwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Kuper, L. (1965) An African Bourgeoisie: race, class, and politics in South Africa.New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

La Hausse, P. (1988) Brewers, Beerhalls and Boycotts: a history of liquor in SouthAfrica. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

——– (1993) ‘So who was Elias Kuzwayo?’ in P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel(eds), Apartheid’s Genesis. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.


Long, N. (2001) Development Sociology: actor perspectives. London: Routledge.Marais, H. (2011) South Africa Pushed to the Limit: the political economy of

change. London: Zed Books.Mbembe, A. (2004) ‘Aesthetics of superfluity’, Public Culture 16 (3): 373–405.Meagher, K. (2010) Identity Economics: social networks and the informal economy

in Nigeria. Woodbridge: James Currey.Murray, C. (2002) ‘Livelihoods research: transcending boundaries of time and

space’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28 (3): 489–510.Porteous, D. and E. Hazelhurst (2004) Banking on Change: democratizing finance

in South Africa, 1994–2004 and beyond. Cape Town: Double Storey Books.Portes, A. and J. Walton (1981) Labor, Class and the International System.

New York NY: Academic Press.Roitman, J. (1990) ‘The politics of informal markets in sub-Saharan Africa’,

Journal of Modern African Studies 28 (4): 671–96.Seekings, J. and N. Nattrass (2005) Class, Race and Inequality in South Africa.

New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press.Shaw, R. (1997) ‘The production of witchcraft/witchcraft as production: memory,

modernity and the slave trade in Sierra Leone’, American Ethnologist 24 (4):856–76.

Shipton, P. (2007) The Nature of Entrustment: intimacy, exchange and the sacredin Africa. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

——– (2009) Mortgaging the Ancestors: ideologies of attachment in Africa.New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

——– (2010) Credit between Cultures: farmers, financiers, and misunderstandingin Africa. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.


Elizabeth Hull and Deborah James Introduction: popular ...

Documents

Transcript of Elizabeth Hull and Deborah James Introduction: popular ...